Liobams lying with rakunks

Set in the future, The Year of the Flood tells the story of the build-up to and aftermath of a pandemic known as the Waterless Flood, which all but eradicates the human race. The environment the survivors are left with is extremely inhospitable: Earth’s natural resources are long depleted, and the flora and fauna that remain are made up of genetically spliced, hybrid organisms such as rakunks (rats crossed with skunks), pigoons (hybrid pigs resembling balloons because they’re stuffed with duplicate human transplant organs), and liobams (lions forced not just to lie down with lambs but to integrate with them biologically) — not to mention soydines, chickeanpeas and beananas.

Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake was set in the same post-apocalyptic world, and several characters from it reappear here. Atwood famously asserts that these speculative fictions (her preferred term) differ from sci-fi because they take place in a plausible future, i.e., one that doesn’t contain anything we don’t have the potential to create here and now. It’s an authorial stance that lends itself strongly to satire. The potential danger is that satire and dystopia, like lions and lambs, can be tricky bedfellows. Make too many jokes and you run the risk of evoking no sympathy for the characters under threat of extinction; make the imaginative space too credibly grim and the jokes won’t work: a bit like trying to gene-splice Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with The Hitch hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The novel focuses on a religious cult called God’s Gardeners, whose goal is ‘to reconcile the findings of Science with their sacramental view of life’. They prepare for the coming of the Waterless Flood (foreseen by their visionary but sanctimonious leader, Adam One) by instilling in their followers a religious devotion to the world’s living creatures and a disdain for its evil corporations.